YouSaid · the spoken record

Po-Shen Loh

lines on the record: 147
first: 2021-05-14
most recent: 2021-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thank you. Thank you. It's actually a real honor for me to talk to you and to get this chance to have this really intellectual conversation through all of these topics.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you see, that's just giving an idea, I guess, what I found meaningful in general. Whether or not it's like whether or not that quadratic thing is important or not, the general idea was I wanted to do things that would outlast me. And that was what inspired me, and that's just how I choose what problems to work”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so that's why I renormalized it because I was like, well, that's kind of dumb. Because what's the importance of that? That'll save people 15 minutes. So what I meant is I didn't want to count that as the main score.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in that case, then the score might get bigger. I was just saying the score might actually already have been achieved in non-trivial way.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if there was one person who for 10 years remembered or appreciated something I did, that counts as a score of 10, and we add up overall people. And then, and that was with the hypothesis that the score would be very finite in the sense that if I didn't come up with anything that might potentially help a lot of generations in a forever way, then your score would be finite because at some point it's not. People don't remember that you made like nice bottles or something, right? But then after the quadratic equation thing, it was that. There's some chance that that actually might make it into textbooks. Yes. And if it makes it into textbooks, the chance that there would be an easier way discovered is actually quite small.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, how do you like to think about it? Sorry, I met people times years. People times. So then it's like actually his is huge. His is like going to be billions or trillions, right? Trillions. I guess for me, I actually changed the metric after a while. And the reason is because you may have seen I found some simple way to solve quadratic equations that is easier than every textbook. My score might already be not bad, which is why I decided let's change it into the number of hours in the lifetimes as well. So the way I was doing it before A person was sort of remembering. 10 years of their life That would count”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, my thing is, I guess I personally just wanted to maximize a certain score, which was for how many person years after I'm no longer here anymore did what I do mattered. It didn't matter if it's necessarily attributed to me. It's just like did it matter? And so that's what I wanted. I guess that is very inspired by how scientists work. It's like, why do we keep talking about Newton? It's because Newton discovered some interesting things. And so Newton's score is pretty high. It's going to be infinity, right? Well,”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess rather than worrying, what if you didn't achieve that? Also, the regret of what have I didn't try. You see, that's how I operate. I don't operate based on did I succeed or fail? It was hard anyway. If I did this Novid thing and the whole thing failed, would I feel terrible? No. It's a very hard problem. But would I have had the regret of not jumping in? Yes. So it's that different mentality don't worry about the failing part as much of the make sure you give yourself the shot at those potentially unbounded opportunities.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just being very generic in explaining this. But I guess this is just my own attitude towards the world. I didn't like ever following anyone's directions exactly. Even if you told me this is the way to do your homework is to write in pencil, I would say, but I think that is nice. Let's try, right? So I've been that kind of a funny person. But I do encourage that if you can learn how to invent as your core skill, then you can do a lot. But then the second piece that comes with that is something I learned from my PhD advisor, PhD advisor, which was, well, make sure that what you're working on is big enough. And so in that sense, I usually advise to people once they have learned how to invent, ideally don't just try to settle for something comfortable. Try to see if you can aim for something which is hard, which might involve a campaign, which might be important, which might make a difference. And it's more of...”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the first one would be to make sure that you're learning to invent and to make sure you're not just learning how to mimic. Because a lot of times you learn how to do X by watching somebody do X and then repeating X many times with different inputs.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it succeeds. I mean, those are false, those are fictitious. But I also spend a lot of time, I guess, reading about, I don't know, I was interested somehow in World War II history for whatever reason. That's a campaign which is much more brutal. But nevertheless, the idea of difficulties, strategy, fighting even when things in that case was really fighting, but just pushing on even when things are difficult. I guess these are the kinds of general stories that made me, I guess, want to work on things that would be hard and where it could be a campaign. It could be that you work on something for a year, multiple years. Because that was the point.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think I don't necessarily have an exact name of these old things, but I was generally inspired by stories true or fictional of campaigns. For example, like The Lord of the Rings, that's a container, right? But the thing that always inspired me was. It could be possible for somebody who's crazy enough to go up against adversity after adversity after adversity.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I don't know the answer to this question. I think it's very interesting, but I actually know, let's put it this way, by being at Carnegie Mellon and being around the theoretical computer scientists, I know enough about what I don't know to say. To be humble. I'm the wrong person to answer this question”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I mean, I would say I know there are enough people who have very strong interest in trying to show that it is. I'm talking about government agencies Purposes for a security pur”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And so, what that heart of the proof was showing that that was a joint work with A. L. Lebetsky, that one was showing that actually in that thing, the lumps do kind of get out of whack. And so it's not the purely logarithmic number of steps. But if you make one very slight change, which is if you are one of the agents and you have just been propositioned, possibly relayed along by a couple of different people, if you just say don't take a random one, but accept the smallest love. That actually does enough to even”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now you suddenly have time, which is about square root of n the square root of n is chosen because that is one where the lumps are such that you really are limited by this large one slowly sucking up the rest of them. So the heart of the question became, well, but is that just so unusual that it doesn't usually happen? Because remember you start with everyone just being independent. It's like a lot of lumps of size.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, what's going to happen? It's going to be a huge bottleneck because every round the giant one can only absorb one of the others”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The bigger the lump is, the more likely it is that you end up reaching that lump. Which is a problem? Let me explain why that's a problem because you see, you're hoping that this has a small number of steps, but here's a bad situation that could happen. Imagine if you had there are end people that you're adding up. Imagine that you have exactly square root of n lumps left, of which Almost all of them are just one person who's still their own boss, their own manager.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Backup delegation chain, and you can do path compression in the algorithm to make it so you don't consistently do lots of walking up. But the bottom line is that what ends up happening is that you end up reaching out whenever you're one of the ones reaching out. You can think of it as each agent is responsible for some number of people. It's almost like they're the leader of a bunch. As the process is evolving, you have these lumps. Each lump has an agent. And when the agent reaches out, they reach out to another lump where the probability of them hitting that lump is proportional to the size of the lump. That is the one funny thing about this process. This is not that they can reach out to a uniformly random lump where every lump has the same chance of getting reached out to.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is somebody else's idea. And now the idea is okay, if you just keep doing this process, what ends up happening? Oh, yeah, and also, by the way, if you decide that you want to go reach out to other people, here's the catch. When you're one of these agents saying, okay, I'm going to go look for someone. You have no idea who in this crowd is an agent or somebody who delegated it to someone else. You just pick a random person. You pick the random person, if it lands on someone and the person says, Oh, I actually delegated it to someone. You follow up.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They randomly choose one, all the others are rejected and they don't get to delegate anything in that round. But now if this person has absorbed this one who said, okay, here, you take charge of my number, this person now updates their pointer. You're in charge. This person adds the two numbers. That was the first round. Next round, when they do the coin flipping, this person doesn't flip anymore because they're just delegating. That anyone who has the pointers themselves, that's like a person who is in charge of some number of information, they flip the coin to decide, should I find other people who are agents? Should I wait for people to ask me?”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got it. Yep. And now the way this works is that at every time step, someone blares a ding dong on the town clock or whatever. And each person flips a coin themselves to decide am I going to hunt for somebody to give my number to? Let them represent me, or am I going to sit here and wait for someone to come? Okay, well, they flipped their coin. Some of the people start asking other people, saying, hey, I would like you to be my representative. Here is my number. But the problem is that there's limited bandwidth of the people who are getting asked. It's like you can't go out to prom with five people. This is not what we're doing. We're adding numbers, okay? But you can only add one number. So, the person who has suddenly gotten asked by all these people. They'll have to decide who they're going to take it from. And they randomly just choose”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And at the very beginning, you're your own representative. The thing has to start simple, right? So at the beginning, you're”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's cheating. So now the question is how to do this in a distributed way. And there were some people who proposed a very elegant algorithm and they wanted to analyze it. So I came in onto the analyze site. But the elegant algorithm was like this. It was like, well, we don't actually know what this big tree is. There isn't any big tree. So what's going to happen is first, everyone is going to decide right now, one important thing. Everyone is going to, at the very beginning of the whole game, they will have delegated responsibility to themselves as the one who knows the sum so far. So the point is there's going to be people are all going to have like a pointer which says, you are the one who knows my, you've taken care of my ticket, my number.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for example, you just went out into the downtown and said, hey, get these thousand people, go. Well, if you're going to go and say, and by the way, you're one and you're two and you're three, that's linear time.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build them a tree from the bottom up. And the beautiful thing is since everyone's doing stuff in parallel, The amount of time it takes to get the total sum is actually just the number of layers in the tree, which is 10. So now that's logarithmic time to add up the number of hours that people slept today. Sounds fantastic. Only one problem. How do you decide who's person number one and person number two?”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Person number two will go away, and person number one is going to remember the sum. Person three and four add up, and person three takes charge of remembering it. Person four goes away. Now this, like, person one knows the sum of these two. Person three knows the sum of those two. They talk. You see what I mean? It's like you're going up this tree, same tree that we talked about earlier.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the easiest way to describe this is suppose you got a big crowd of people and everybody knows how many hours of sleep they got last night. And you want to know how many total hours of sleep were gotten by this big crowd of people. At the beginning, you might say, that sounds like a linear time algorithm of saying, hey, how many hours you got? How many you got? How many you got? Add, add. There's a way to do this if you remember that they're all people and they presumably know how to add, you could make a distributed algorithm to make this happen. For example, while we're thinking of these trees, imagine you had 1,024 people. If you could just say, hey, person number one and person number two, you will add your hours of sleep.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this was something which came up when I was at Microsoft Research for a summer. And I'm putting that context because that shows that it has some practical motivation at some point. Actually, I think it's still. It doesn't need to.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think a little bit about those because where I went to college the way we voted for student government was based on this, is it called ranked choice where you eliminate the bottom and there was runoff elections? So that was the first time I ever saw that. And I thought that made sense. The only problem is it doesn't seem so easy to get something that makes sense adopted as a new voting system. That's a whole nother.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the point is the outcome of this circuit has a certain property. If you see a 7, you know that the 7 actually be the bazillion people. If you see anyone else, at least you know they beat seven.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I can tell you the nice feature because if at the base of this giant tree, at the base of this giant circuit, like this is a widget, we build the things out of widgets. So I'm just describing one widget. But in the base of this widget, you have lots of things which are seven against someone, seven against someone, seven against someone. In fact, every matchup at the bottom is seven against someone. What that means is Seven actually beat everyone they were matched up against, well, seven would rise to the top. So, one possibility is if you see a seven emerge from the top, you know that seven actually beat everyone they were against. On the other hand, if anyone else is on top, let's call it F. If F is on top, how did F get there? Well, F beat seven on the way at the beginning.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can give an idea of one of the tools inside. But the actual execution ends up being more complicated. But one of the widgets inside this is building a system where you have like a candidate who plays one part of the whole huge, huge tree is that same candidate, let's call him seven, seven plays against somebody. Let's pick up some numbers. Let's call the others like letters. So seven plays against Seven's also going to play against B separately. And the winners of each of those will play each other. By the way, Seven is also going to place C. Seven is going to play D, and the winners are going to play each other, and the winners are going to play each other. We call this seven against all. Well, seven against everyone from a bunch of.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we actually only managed to improve it to square root of n. So if n is number of vertices, n over 2 would be the ideal. Got it to end it. We got it to square root of n.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A balanced binary tree one, two, three, four up to 2024, everyone going up to find the winner. Well, you know what? There's a system in the world where it could just be that there's a candidate called number one that just beats like 10 other people. Just attend that they need to be on their way up. And they lose to everyone else. But somehow they would get all the way up My point is it is possible to outsmart that circuit in one weird way of the world. Which makes that circuit a bad one because you want to say, I will use this circuit for all elections, and you might have a system of inputs that go in there where the winner only beat 10 other people, which is the people they had to beat on their way up.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best known circuit when we started thinking about this was the circuit called Candidate One plays against candidate two, candidate three plays against four And then the winners play against each other. And then, by the way, five plays against six, seven against eight. The winners play against each other. You understand? It's like a giant binary tree where you.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is true, but actually at this point, the reason the question was interesting. It's because there was no good guarantee that the winner of that circuit would have beaten a lot of people. Let me give an example.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least average. Yeah, yeah, this is this notion of expected value If I have a random variable which has an expected value, there's going to be some possibility in the probability space where you're at least as big as the expected.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything you're saying makes perfect sense. Okay, so the point is if For every comparison between two people, which I'm doing for every two people, I gave one point to each person, your score, everyone's score, is the same. It's how many other people there are. Now we only make one change for each matchup, you give one point only to the winner. So we're awarding half the points. So now the deal is if in the original situation everyone's score was equal, which is how many other people there are, now there's only half the number of points to go around. So, what ends up happening is that there's always going to be like the average number of points per person is going to be half of how many other people there are. And somebody is going to be above”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me explain it this way. Imagine that for every match, you didn't give one point, but you gave two points. You gave one point to each person. Now, that's not what we're really doing. We really want to give one point to the winner of the match. But instead, we'll just give two. If you gave two points to everyone on every matchup, actually everyone has the same number of points. And the number of points they get is how many other people there are. That sort of makes sense? I'm just like”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, but I can explain it. No, no, I can't. The way it works is that think of it this way every time, and imagine I have all these candidates and everyone is everyone is compared with everyone else at some point. Well, think of it this way. Whenever there's a comparison, somebody gets a point. The one who is better than the other one. My claim is there's somebody whose score is at least half of how many other people there are.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See who wins, and so on. Okay, so now what would be a nice outcome, right? This is a general question of could I make a big circuit board to feed an election into, like maybe one nice outcome would be whoever wins at least is preferred over a lot of people. So, for example, if you ran in 1024 candidates, ideally we would like a guarantee that says that the winner beats a lot of people. Actually, in any system where there are 1,024 candidates, there's always a candidate who beats at least 512 of the others. This is a mathematical fact that there's actually always a person who beats at least half of the other people.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a system of head to head contests, which you structure it like a tree almost looking like a circuit. I'm using that way of thinking because it's sort of like electrical engineering or computer science. You might imagine having a bunch of leads that carry signal which are going through AND gates and OR gates and whatnot and you manage to compute beautiful things. This is just from a purely abstract point of view. What if the inputs are candidates? And for every two candidates, it is known which of the candidates is more popular than the other. Now can you build some kind of a circuit board which says, first, candidate number four will play against five.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this is an example of, I guess, how in math, we might say here's an interesting kind of a question that we just can't seem to understand enough about. And maybe there's something else going on here. And the way to describe this is you could imagine trying to hold elections where if you have only two candidates, that's kind of easy. You just run them against each other and see who gets more votes. But as you know, once you have more candidates, it's very difficult to decide who wins the election. And there's an entire voting theory around this. So a theoretical question became, what if you made like a system of”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very much so. Because if you want to make something practical which has large numbers of people using it, the computational complexity to me is almost question one. Again, that's at the origin of when we started doing this stuff with disease control from the very beginning, the deep questions that we're running through my mind were, would we be able to support a large population with only one server? And if the answer is no, we can't start because I don't have enough money. Yeah,”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I actually personally like all kinds of math. My area of research just ended up in here because I met a really interesting PhD advisor. That's honestly the reason I went into that direction. I met a really interesting guy. He seemed like he did good stuff, interesting stuff, and he looked like he cared about students. And I said, let me just go and learn whatever you do, even though my prior practice and preparation before my PhD was not combinatorics, but analysis, the continuous stuff.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So combinatorics to me is the study of things where Might be more finite and more discrete. What I mean is, like, if I look at a network, actually, a lot of times the combinatorics will boil down to something, and the combinatorics I think about might be something related to graphs or networks. And they're very discrete because if you have a node, it's not that you have 0.7 of a node and 0.3 of a node over there. It's that you got one node and then you jump one step to go to the next node. So that notion is different from, say, calculus, which is very continuous, where you go and say, I have this speed which is changing over time. And now what's the distance I've traveled? That's the notion of an integral, where you have to think of subdividing time into very, very small pieces. So the kinds of things that you do when you reason about these finite, discrete structures often might be iterative, algorithmic, inductive. These are ideas where I go from one step to the next step and so on. And make progress.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I like what you said about the daily also because that's also one reason why I put my Carnegie Mellon class online. It's not every day. It's every other day. Semester is almost over. But the idea was, I guess my philosophy was if I'm already doing the class, let's just put it there, right? But I do know that there are people who have been following it, who are not in my class at all, who have just been following it because, yes, it's combinatorics, and the value of that is you could, you don't really need to know calculus to follow it, if that makes sense. It's actually something that people could follow. So, again, and that one's free, so that one's just there on YouTube.”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the way to make it practical is if the timer on the automatically daily is that you are going to automatically daily do something with your own kid. Now it feeds back. Okay”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kids. I'm just saying this because I'm just thinking out loud right now, what could I do? What could I do to suggest? Because what I have noticed is that, for example, if you do have kids who are in elementary school or middle school, if you yourself go and look at those middle school math problems to think about interesting ways that you can teach your elementary school or middle school kid, it works. That's what my wife did. She never did any of those contests before. But now knows quite a lot about them. I didn't teach her anything. I don't do that. She Was messing around with them and taught herself all of that stuff. And that had the automatic daily. I'm always thinking, how do you make it practical, right?”
2021-05-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #183 – Po-Shen Loh: Mathematics, Math Olympiad, Combinatorics & Contact Tracing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source